Floating above the dining room table, the icon of Jesus and the broken cuckoo clock spins green light out of a fluorescent tube. It flickers from time to time. It has been a long four hours on the turnpike and exhausted children zoom up and bang on the creaky old screen door. She always opens the door the same way — peeking around the curtains through the window just to the right of the door. Warm yellow light floods onto the splintered green porch. It probably hasn’t been painted since the seventies. Those antsy kiddos pour through the door, to the playroom, and dump railroad tracks and Lincoln Logs all over the floor. This is what they’ve been waiting for for months.

tubes. fluorescent tubes.

Now there’s a new tube. It’s on the second floor, just like the first. It’s the dining room too and there are icons of Christ. The cuckoo clock is missing. Don’t worry. We’ll find one. Do you remember playing baseball in the crabgrass-backyard or watching Pirates game on channel 8? There were only twelve channels but they were so exotic. There were those vines up the hill in the neighbor’s yard. We swung and swung and swung on those. Those colored bottles on top of the blue-brick wall disappeared around the same time.

Years back, there were 11,000 in Cambria City; now, they’d be lucky to clear 1,000. The mini rivers powered the steel mills. Plumes of smoke and steel city iron motored this little city in the valley. Just before 1890, the flood pummeled everything alive. And look at it now: the pride of Cambria County. Will these fat days ever end?

A small brown Dodge pickup winds east. Five days later, it heads west. And on and on; and on and on. Soon, the repetition stops. One hundred eighty two miles separate the two dots. Relocation is permanent. We’ll visit lots, though. The glowing tube, seen through old windows, will be our first greeter.

I am so insanely lucky. The last weekend of my single life couldn’t have been any better. I have no words to describe the gratefulness that pours from my soul. Seven and a half years ago, I moved to Pittsburgh on a dreadfully cold, sun-splashed February day. It was the day I decided to grow up. It was only fitting that the bookend to that chapter was placed here, my home away from home, in a quaint little cabin a jaunt up 28 and of course, at PNC Park.

In years’ past, I rarely lacked words, but in the recent months, I have typically been rendered speechless. I am finding that words don’t usually do much justice to the things we wish to explain. I only wish I could describe how much these guys mean to me and how a weekend like this helps put that into a sharper focus. I love them so much and without their kindness and friendship and brotherhood, I would not be who I am and I would not be capable of marrying my lovely lady.

The last bastion of bachelorhood has been conquered, in the place where it truly began. A story starts anew this weekend but that one couldn’t have happened without this one. And it is to these guys who I owe so much to. I wish words would do justice to the deepest feelings of thankfulness that my heart wishes to express…

Pirates 6, Phillies 3 : Most attended baseball game in the history of PNC

I love baseball. I love Pittsburgh and I love the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Never before have I been to a baseball game with such electricity in the air. Electric Charlie pitched seven stellar innings and despite running into a 9th inning jam, the Pittsburgh Baseball Club won Saturday night in front of 39,441 at PNC Park — almost 1,500 more than capacity. As the game wound down, deafening chants of “Let’s go Bucs!” roared throughout the stadium. Those who say Pittsburgh isn’t a baseball town don’t know what they’re talking about. We just desperately want a winner.

Let’s hope ‘cutch, Electric Charlie, Pedro and the rest can make that happen sooner rather than later.